Joyce’s funny, moving and infuriating masterpiece should send us, not into the cold and sterile embrace of the examination room, but out again into the warm and throbbing world.

The Italian critic and editor Roberto Calasso enjoys a considerable reputation among the literary-critical elite, but how much substance or originality is there in his anti-rational musings?

Edna O’Brien’s memoir refuses to satisfy our curiosity or submit to the demands for interpretation. She has fought others’ desire for control from childhood, and in her eighties is still fighting.

In an age when martyrdom is demonised and tagged with notions of fanaticism and people are reluctant to protest for a cause let alone die for one, 1916 presents an easy target.

All is very far from what it seems in a literary mystery novel by poet Ciaran Carson set in Belfast and Paris.

Lyrics have been defined as short poems written to the accompaniment of a musical instrument, but should Paul Muldoon’s lyrics be judged primarily as poems or as songs?

This book examines many little understood aspects of the Irish landscape from the last Ice Age until now. Historians, archaeologists, biologists and earth scientists each bring their own perspective on  the landscape and the life it has supported, giving a new understanding of the history of the Irish ecosystem.

 New biography of  the Irishman now claimed by the Conservatives as their founding father. The author see Edmund Burke as one of the eighteenth century's golden generation, which includes his friends Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon. In this book Burke is seen as a now underrated dazzling orator and visionary theorist.

Contemporary Ireland, north and south, was founded in the decade 1912-23. From the signing of the Ulster Unionists' Solemn League and Covenant to the partitioning of the country and subsequent civil war in the Irish Free State, a series of events shaped Ireland  for the century to come.